Category Archives: environment

Post navigation

NIMBY, NIMBY, NIMBY – this example from New York of all wonderfully liberal places:

Naples, N.Y. — The Town Board Monday unanimously rejected a proposed wind-turbine project in the town, determining the gigantic power-generating machines would have a negative effect on the environment. The board also agreed it wants to impose a six-month moratorium on wind turbines, though that decision requires a public hearing and final board vote.

“Most people did not want wind turbines,” Town Supervisor Margaret Dunn said Tuesday.

Come, come now people. The Messiah has decreed that you will have electricity if the wind blows or the sun shines. Why in the world would good New Yorkers not want wind turbines?

Last month, hundreds of residents in this Yates County town of 1,000, bordering Naples, turned out largely to voice their opposition to turbines in an emotionally charged gathering. Most of the 116 residents who spoke at the meeting were against the machines, said Dunn.

When the board convened Monday, it determined the 17 proposed turbines would have a negative impact due to noise, light flicker and positioning on steep slopes. Dunn said the board was particularly disturbed because the original proposal stated the turbines would not be sited on slopes exceeding 15 percent, yet the environmental study showed some were slated to be built on such slopes.

Resident Vince Johnson, who lives on Italy Hill Turnpike near a targeted turbine site, said he was worried about storm-water runoff from turbines — as well as noise and possible effect on spring-fed wells

Water runoff? Slopes? Noise? Wells? Hey – who wouldn’t want to have 20 story turbines booming away. But they are very very very very green!

So should local cities be able to throw roadblocks in the way of energy independence and Algore worship?

Yeah, but shouldn’t the first clue of failure have been the very idea of building an 800 square-foot house in Troy, MI that cost $900,000 — that is, $1,125 per square foot? The median price of homes in Troy is about $159,000 and that’s for an 1,800 sq. ft home — about $88 per square foot.

Even if the solar system hadn’t malfunctioned, who in their right mind would consider the house a success?

I suppose it’s fitting that this tragi-comedy occurred in a place called Troy — the greens are trying to deceive us in adopting their nutty policies and goofy technologies with a Trojan House.

It was supposed to be a shining example of the green movement — a completely independent solar-powered house with no gas or electrical hookups.

Seven months ago, officials gathered for a ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate the $900,000 house owned by the city of Troy that was to be used as an educational tool and meeting spot.

But it never opened to the public. And it remains closed.

Frozen pipes during the winter caused $16,000 in damage to floors, and city officials aren’t sure when the house at the Troy Community Center will open…

“The system was designed to kick a heater on to keep water from freezing,” [the superintendent of parks for the city] said. “The heater drew all reserve power out of the battery causing the system to back down and the pipes froze.”

Every once in a while somebody in Europe actually has to confront reality. In this case, it is Sweden realizing that if they decommission all their nuclear power stations they will either a) freeze or b) open lots of nice coal-fired power plants. They have been able to pretend since 1980–when they first passed their law outlawing new nuclear power plants–that they will phase out all nuclear power plants. But now its coming down to the time when they are supposed to actually shut them down.

In 1980, Sweden was on the vanguard. In that year, a referendum passed calling for a ban on the construction of new nuclear reactors in the country and the ultimate phase out of existing reactors. It was a model that was eventually emulated by Germany and seen as the way of the future.

On Thursday, the country once again took a step into the future — by abandoning the ban on new nuclear power plants. Stockholm said the move was necessary to avoid energy sources that produce vast quantities of greenhouse gases. While Sweden has been a leader in developing alternative energy sources, they still have not been enough to completely replace nuclear power, which supplies half the country’s energy.

The new proposal, presented by the country’s center-right coalition, calls for the construction of new reactors as the old ones are taken out of service. Parliament will vote on the bill on March 17.

Its always interesting how the prospect of freezing to death concentrates the mind wonderfully. Of course, the ecoNazis are going ballistic:

The decision has angered the Swedish opposition as well as environmentalists around the world. “To rely on nuclear power to reduce CO2 emissions,” Greenpeace spokeswoman Martina Kruger said, “is like smoking to lose weight. It’s not a good idea.”

There are no ideas from the ecoFreaks about how to replace 50% of your country’s energy (the amount now provided by nuclear power). Sweden subsidizes the ever-lovin’ snot out of every “renewable” energy source they can think of, and it only amounts to 14% of their energy use. And no matter how much the ecoCrazies yell, people still want things like electricity and heat and cars and food and medicine and all the things that are part of civilization today.

I have an idea. Perhaps they could breed lots and lots of little hamsters and then put them on cages and have them run around and around. And just connect generators to them and you will have non-nuclear power.

Germany‘s federal environment agency has issued a strong advisory for people to return to prewar norms of eating meat only on special occasions and otherwise to model their diet on that of Mediterranean countries.

“We must rethink our high meat consumption,” said Andreas Troge, president of the UBA, the government’s advisory body on environmental issues.

“I recommend people return to the Sunday roast and to an orientation of their eating habits around those of Mediterranean countries.”

And remember – this is all done to cure man-made global warming. It is interesting how that phrase has morphed into climate change, but essentially its – you Krauts, meat once a week if fine for peasants. I hardly get the feeling that German diplomats are going to be munching salads 3 meals a day 6 days a week as they entertain their other aristocrats.

But a little belt-tightening is good for the peasants. Keeps them from thinking too well of themselves. I mean England is going along with this crap at their hospitals:

Meat-free menus are to be promoted in hospitals as part of a strategy to cut global warming emissions across the National Health Service.

Unfortunately its just a preview of coming attractions. The Messiah has decreed that America is to destroy its economy on the altar of greenery. Just today he signed the death warrant for the auto manufacturers. Your future government ration cards will not include a daily meat ration. Perhaps you can supplement your diet by trapping and eating squirrels and pigeons.

Elsewhere, Chavez found time to defend Venezuela’s human rights record and vaunt his country’s oil reserves, but also gave his views on less weighty matters like fashion, pop music and the British royal family.

Cuba’s Fidel Castro was the world’s most stylish leader, he said (“His uniform is impeccable. His boots are polished. His beard is elegant”), he was aware of the newly-reformed Spice Girls and admired Britain’s Prince Charles.

He also refused to rule out following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s example and posing for topless photographs. “Why not? Touch my muscles,” he reportedly told the supermodel.

====================================

2. Hillary Doozy of the Year

ABC News’ Eloise Harper Reports: Senator Hillary Clinton, in an interview with ABC News’ Cynthia McFadden for ABC News’ Nightline, was asked about President Clinton’s controversial comments about race and Senator Obama in the past weeks. Clinton apologized for her husband.

“I think whatever he said which was certainly never intended to cause any kind of offense to anyone,” Clinton said, “if it did give offenses then I take responsibility and I’m sorry about that.”

I hate the Republican Party and everything it stands for, including, but not limited to, its interest in denying women reproductive health rights, denying children the right to legally recognized two parent homes if their parents are gay, and their not-so-subtle “be afraid of anyone who isn’t pasty white” message.

But I’ve learned to HATE with a passion that I never knew prior to the November 2000 Election, and I will *never* forget it.

Republicans are Evil, and I hate them.

===============================

4. The “I Just Hate People Except for My Six Children” Quote of 2008 – With an Added Bonus Globaloney Warming Kicker

TED TURNER: Not doing it will be catastrophic. We’ll be eight degrees hottest in ten, not ten but 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals. Civilization will have broken down. The few people left will be living in a failed state — like Somalia or Sudan — and living conditions will be intolerable. The droughts will be so bad there’ll be no more corn grown. Not doing it is suicide. Just like dropping bombs on each other, nuclear weapons is suicide. We’ve got to stop doing the suicidal two things, which are hanging on to our nuclear weapons and after that we’ve got to stabilize the population. When I was born-

CHARLIE ROSE: So what’s wrong with the population?

TURNER: We’re too many people. That’s why we have global warming. We have global warming because too many people are using too much stuff. If there were less people, they’d be using less stuff.

“I do like McCain and the people around him, and I consider him still to be a friend. But I have fundamental differences with John McCain on the issues and always have. I don’t have any problem criticizing John McCain….It was no secret to the reporters around me that I have Democratic-leaning views. But they said I was always fair.”— Former ABC and CBS reporter Linda Douglass, now a spokeswoman for Barack Obama, as quoted by the WashingtonPost’s Howard Kurtz in a June 16 profile.

=======================================

6. Media Twit of the Year

CBS News journalist Richard Butler said he believes he was kidnapped in Iraq by policemen with sympathies toward the Hezbollah but isn’t entirely sure who held him captive for two months or why.

Butler, a British journalist kidnapped with his interpreter on Feb. 10, was rescued by Iraqi troops on April 14 when he was found with a sack over his head in a house in Basra.

Butler said he felt it was better to be kidnapped in Iraq then taken into custody by Americans in Afghanistan.

“I was pleased I wasn’t being mortarboarded in Guantanamo or being held for six and a half years like an Al-Jazeera cameraman, for instance,” he said.

From some twittet working for McKinsey (and heading up a non-profit corporation) in London:

If Barack Obama gets his way we could see the unleashing of a green revolution which will lift the economy.

Mr Obama and his team are strong supporters of a cap-and-trade scheme, similar to that operating in Europe, to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The Obama version would auction permits to pollute, among companies which burn fossil fuels. Over time the number of permits would fall, ratcheting down the “cap” on total pollution. It’s a simple idea, invented in the US in the 1980s, to combat acid rain.

This is the wonderful idea that even the High and Self-Important one admitted would “cause electricity costs to skyrocket”. But that’s not a concern to somebody who’s energy costs are completely paid for by the government:

Old economy pundits fear that a cap-and-trade scheme will hit the economy when it is down, by raising electricity prices and slashing energy company profits. Mr Obama doesn’t seem to buy that line. Asked by Time magazine a few weeks ago whether he wouldn’t need to go slow on introducing cap-and-trade, he said that part of the revenue raised by auctioning permits should go straight back to the consumer, maybe through a rebate on payroll tax. John Podesta, the head of Mr Obama’s transition team, has suggested that the revenues could be used to build new clean-energy transmission lines, and to insulate homes, thus giving a short-term stimulus.

Why do I believe that the government will simply keep all the money to spend on things it thinks are important – rather than actually sending any of it back to the peasants. Because its all right there for everybody to take:

A cap-and-trade scheme could raise around $150 billion a year. The American pipe-fitters union supports carbon caps because they are likely to mean non-exportable jobs in laying a new energy infrastructure. “Weatherisation” (insulating homes) could be the centrepiece of a green new deal that creates “green collar” jobs and simultaneously saves people money on their energy bills. This is FDR in triplicate: creating jobs, cutting energy bills, and boosting hundreds of small companies which are already manufacturing everything from solar components to LED lighting to high-tech coatings for wind turbines (some of which are incidentally, being made from old car parts). Far from being a one-way drain on the economy, green regulation could boost the economy in straitened times.

Your future awaits. Union thugs stuffing insulation into houses no one can afford because electricity and a mortgage are too expensive, hunched over your latest tax bill reading by the light of your teeny tiny LED and simply hoping the wind blows for another 10 minutes before you go completely dark.

The next generation will really be happy about that. They won’t even be able to play their iPods since the green taxes on any electronics will be 1000%.

For the most part, the top contestants frequently rode bikes instead of driving, kept the heat down in the winter, grew some of their own food, went without air-conditioning and airplane travel, and spent little on clothes and entertainment. Dunn pulled ahead of the others in part because he uses a wood-burning furnace, which produces local air pollution but lowers carbon emissions significantly. He also had an advantage in that he eats expired and discarded food he acquires from stores and restaurants in his work as a recycler and composter.

Dunn beat out second-place finisher Sayre Vickers, 32, in part because of his living arrangements. Dunn, who is divorced with three grown children, didn’t live with his current partner and their two young children during the period covered by the contest. But he shared his home heating bill—and split the associated carbon emissions—with three people who live beneath him. Vickers lives solo.Vickers, of Garfield Park, grows tomatoes, basil, wild spinach, kale and peppers in front of the sunny windows of his apartment and makes his own furniture from discarded wood. With no running water, he hauls his 3 gallons a day from the bathroom one floor below.

The toilet is a bucket, with a 30-gallon garbage can nearby for storing human waste layered with sawdust. Vickers has a friend in the suburbs who allows him to park the cans when they fill up. The contents decompose, forming compost.

and how do we know this is what we would be required to do if the idiots in the ecoNazi movement were given half a chance? Well, they come right out and say so:

Dunn is already living at roughly the level of carbon emissions that scientists at the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say the average human must achieve by 2100 if we are to avoid dangerous effects of global warming.

Yes, the reach of the Green Overlords. No running water, burn logs for heat, no ac, no car, no travel, no new clothes – just be glad they allow you to live I guess. What they really want to do is turn back civilization.

Its articles like that which make me turn up the ac just a little bit more.

And what about people who don’t have nice friends – like Vickers – who allow them to stack up buckets of human waste in their yards?